The Great Divide
by boney
Summary: The bombs begin to fall on London in the humid summer of 1941. Before the Horcruxes, before the realization of his infamous ancestor, all Tom Riddle has is his wits and his skill. He has choices to make.
1. Chapter 1

A distant scream and a terrible thud woke Tom in the darkness of his bedroom. Heavy curtains were drawn tight against the tall windows beside his head. The room was tepid, the bleak tile of the walls holding onto the mercilessly humid July air. Tom blinked in the pitch darkness, the scratchy heaviness of the wool blankets suffocating him. He quickly extracted himself from their vice grip, his plain cotton shirt sticking to his skin. In the distance, he heard another howling scream, and an earth shattering crash, closer this time.

The bombs were falling.

Distantly, he heard the other children begin to fuss and cry as the bombs awoke them. He heard sudden clicking as the girls working at the orphanage came running to the nursery, down the hall from Tom's bedroom to answer to the growing cries from the babies.

Tom threw his covers off and stood from his bed, his bare feet hitting the moist tile floor. As he stood, another screaming bomb seemed to tear through the sky and land with so loud a crash that the orphanage shook. Tom balanced himself, seeing the reddish flames of the place where it had hit dimly flickering through the heavy curtains of his room.

He padded quickly over to his closet, where he hid his trunk and his Hogwarts things, and retrieved his Yew wand from the top shelf. If the Muggles were going to bomb themselves to smithereens, he was not going to be a victim. The wails of the other children had grown to a crescendo after this latest bomb. He could hear the matron, Mrs. Cole, shrilly giving out orders as the evacuation process began, hearing her boots clicking down the hallway. Suddenly, he heard the doorknob opening to his room and he hastily shoved his wand into the waistband of his pants, underneath his shirt.

's face appeared in the darkness, holding a candle, her thin greying hair sticking to her forehead and her eyes wide.

"Tom?" she called, laying eyes on him standing in the middle of the floor, "Come on, we have to get to the shelter..."

He nodded at her, and followed her out of the room. He followed her as she rushed to the nursery, passing other rooms with girls helping the children quickly into their shoes. He knew what she was going to say before she said it.

"Tom, we have too many babies for us all to carry. You and John, Mary and Lizzy will have to take one each."

He didn't reply, but met the other older children in the room. Mary, a thirteen year old girl with lank black hair, stood trembling. Another scream and a blast whirled outside and landed so close to them that the window rattled. Lizzy screamed, covering her head.

"Come on!" Mrs. Cole called, rushing them, "there's four babies that haven't been taken yet!"

Tom rushed to the back of the room near the window where a newborn was squalling throatily. Just as he reached the window, the screech of a bomb sounded off, horrifyingly close to them. The sound of the plane's engine rattled his head. He knew it was going to hit them. He threw himself down onto the floor just as the bomb exploded outside of the window. The glass blasted inwards, shattering and flying into the room. The other children and Mrs. Cole screamed.

After the world righted itself, Tom stood shakily to his feet and looked into the crib by the shattered window. Inside, the newborn had stopped crying. Large glass shards pierced the bedding and the infant's tiny body. It's eyes were open wide, reflecting the fire that was beginning to rage outside from the impact of the bomb. He turned away to where the other children clambered with screaming babies towards the door. Mrs. Cole strode forward and grabbed Tom's collar, dragging him forward.

"Come on, come on," she urged, but he could hear the catch in her voice as her eyes swept over the baby by the window.

He tripped over his feet as she pulled him forward and pushed him bodily through the door before her.

"Follow the others, I'm going to make sure everyone's gone!" she shouted after him. Tom didn't need telling twice. His bare feet pounded the tile floor as he ran to catch up to Mary, Lizzie and John, who were rushing down the staircase, babies in their arms. Lizzie was younger than them, about eight years old, and the baby was squirming, slowing her down. Tom snatched the baby out of her hands and edged her forward.

"Go! Keep going!" he commanded her, pressing the squirming, screaming infant to his chest with one arm and pushing the little girl ahead of him between her shoulder blades. Her nightgown was smudged with ash and her feet were bleeding from the broken glass. His own were sliced, his dark hair wet with sweat. The little girl was gasping for breath as she tried to keep up with them. They made it out of the orphanage, through a side door in the kitchen. Across the large muddy yard, the entrance to the underground bomb shelter that had been haphazardly set up was open with one of the matron girls screaming at them.

As they ran across the yard, Tom heard the drone of a plane engine above them, so close that it was as though its belly would scrape their heads. He heard the mechanical thunk as a bomb was let go.

Tom stopped dead in his tracks as the bomb tore screaming through the air, down towards them.

He thought quickly. He pulled the little girl, Lizzie by the arm, off balancing her so she fell backwards to the ground. He dropped the infant down on her belly and brandished his wand from his waistband, throwing himself bodily over the two children. He had no idea if this would work, but if he didn't try, he would die a pitiful death among the filthy swaths of a foolish Muggle conflict. He refused that to be his legacy.

He had read, in his leisure time at Hogwarts, a spell which would create a bubble-like shield around the caster that would neutralize anything that hit it. He remembered the incantation, and brandishing his wand upwards, muttered it.

" _Neutroclipus!"_

His world went black.


	2. Chapter 2

When he awoke, he was lying on his back. The acrid smell of fire burnt his nostrils, and he blearily opened his eyes. Clutched in his filthy hand was his wand. He quickly sat up, his head swimming, and shoved it into his waistband to hide it. He looked around and found himself in the scorched grass. Ahead of him, the prone form of the little girl Lizzy and the baby she'd been carrying lie. The baby was screaming and kicking. Lizzy looked pale, but when he limped over to her, he could tell she was still breathing. It was daytime. The sky was a pale blue, clouds drifting lazily by, completely unfazed by the rubble and death below them.

They'd survived, he noted dimly, his ears ringing painfully.

He looked over to where the bomb shelter was, and noticed it was empty. He turned towards the road and saw the brick wall surrounding the orphanage was broken and had fallen into the street. Mrs. Cole's face was blackened with soot, and her face was cut. He could vaguely hear her voice calling orders to the crying children and matron girls around her, who looked filthy and terrified, but alive. She turned and saw Tom standing in the lawn and looked as though she'd seen a ghost. Tom was confused, but then realized that they'd all been hit with a bomb– he, the baby and Lizzie had been hit _directly_.

 _She must have thought we were dead…_

" _Tom!"_ she called. He couldn't hear her voice, but he could read her lips.

One of the matron girls noticed the screaming baby in the lawn and climbed over the rubble of the brick fence to come and fetch it. When she gathered it in her arms, she looked over at Lizzy and saw that she was miraculously alive.

" _Can you carry her?_ " the matron girl asked him.

He read her lips, and gingerly knelt by the skinny girl's form, lifting her effortlessly into his arms. Her white nightgown was ruined, scorched in so many places it was barely a garment at all. She was breathing peacefully. He limped slowly over to the wall with the matron girl, Lizzy in his arms.

When they were all together, he placed the girl alongside other children who were passed out, lined along the sidewalk. Mrs. Cole strode over to him, speaking. The ringing in his ears was incessant and he couldn't hear her.

She stopped trying to speak to him, and reached over with her sooty apron to wipe the sides of his ears. They must have been bleeding. Then she took his face in her two hands, something that she had never done before.

At this point in his life, Tom had been surreptitiously experimenting with Legilimency. He knew it wasn't a normal pursuit for a wizard his age, but he was no normal wizard his age. Muggles, he found, were the best to practice on because they had no concept of Legilimency and often wore their emotions on their minds as plain as day. She stared into his eyes, her dark ones boring into him, urging him to understand. He did.

 _Thank you,_ her mind screamed, _Thank you thank you thank you thank you_ …

She knew. Somehow, she knew. She knew he was different. She knew he could do things other children couldn't. She must somehow have known that he was the reason they were all still alive.

He hadn't meant the shield to be that effective, but he supposed, his raw skill was great enough that it was possible his shield had extended much further. He had never used the spell before.

A small lurch in his stomach reminded him that he had done magic outside of school.

Just then, he felt eyes on him, boring into him, and knew what he would see when he turned around.

Across the street, in an eye-sore of a puce suit, stood Albus Dumbledore.


	3. Chapter 3

It turned out that there was a perfectly circular scorch mark on the yard of the orphanage extending thirty feet in all directions around Tom. The shield hadn't worked perfectly– he had unintentionally neutralized the blast by injuring himself and all the other children and matrons in small degrees, essentially neutralizing the concentration of the blast so that it mildly scorched them and their surroundings. However, it had worked– none of them were severely harmed and they were all alive. Tom made a note to perfect the spell once he got back to Hogwarts. _If he ever got back to Hogwarts…_

He was sitting, perched somewhat uncomfortably, on a crooked chair in the _Leaky Cauldron_ , nursing black tea. Across the table from him, Albus Dumbledore's piercing blue eyes stared at him.

"So, Tom," he began in an irritatingly pleasant voice, "I am here to deliver to you your very first warning against underage magic. However… I believe that considering the circumstances, you may want to write to the Ministry and inform them of how many lives you were able to save today. I talked to Mrs. Cole and she seemed to think it was an act of God, so the Obliviators won't have to be involved..."

Tom wasn't going to correct him. He knew that Mrs. Cole somehow knew it was him who had neutralized the blast, and for the first time, he found himself thanking her for her silence and was somewhat amazed that she had had the mental strength to lie to Dumbledore. He'd have to investigate her further, when he was bored the following summer. Perhaps she was a squib?

He found his mind wandering and re-collected himself. His ears were still ringing painfully and he felt a major headache brewing behind his eyes. Dumbledore was sipping a overwhelmingly pungent tea and gazing benignly at his pupil.

"Here it is, then," Dumbledore stated, reaching into his suit pocket and pulling out a letter, which unfolded itself before him.

 _Dear Mr Tom Riddle,_

 _It has come to the attention of the Improper Use of Magic Office that the 'Neutroclipus' spell was performed at your residence at 3:47 AM on July the 23rd, 1940. We would like to remind you that the performance of underage magic directly violates the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Magic. This is your final warning. Should another incident occur, you will promptly be expelled from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry._

 _Should you have any inquiries, please contact the Improper Use of Magic Office._

 _Hoping you are well,  
Geraldine Gravishaw._

Tom finished the letter and placed it to the side.

"Sir," he asked, addressing Dumbledore with unusual politeness, "Is the Ministry of Magic simply unaware that there are Muggle bombs falling on London every night?"

Dumbledore's eyes twinkled at him, something they had never done in his presence.

"Unfortunately, Tom… The Ministry will do anything it can to avoid acknowledging war. This war is not just a Muggle war. The wizard Grindelwald has also begun a wizarding war in Germany, as I am sure you are aware. It is not on British soil, however, so the Ministry–"

"Pretends it's not there," Tom finished for him, rubbing his temples in an uncharacteristic display of his exhaustion.

"Yes," Dumbledore said solemnly. They both sat for an indeterminate amount of time before Dumbledore spoke again.

"Would you wish to return to Hogwarts early this year, Tom?"

Tom froze, his mind beginning to race. What was Dumbledore playing at? Tom had gotten the distinct impression that Dumbledore had thoroughly disliked him the moment he set eyes upon him, and frankly, the feeling had been mutual. Dumbledore was patronizing and often cold to him. What did he have to gain by suddenly extending this truce, as it were? Even _with_ the bombs falling, he had never offered him a place of safety. It had taken him almost dying for the man to act, in fact.

Dumbledore must have noticed Tom's narrowed eyes and stiff posture, for her sat back gently in his chair and sighed.

"I, too, have been a fool, Tom. I did not think that the Muggle bombs would reach London. We always believe that when tragedy strikes, it will strike elsewhere and to someone else. This is clearly not so, and it was foolish of me to believe it was."

Tom stared at Dumbledore unabashedly, trying to read his meaning.

"There are other Muggleborn children who live in London, and as citizens under the Ministry of Magic, they and their families are being offered places of refuge outside of the city. The Ministry has unfortunately put in place a policy of non-interference with regards to the Muggle inhabitants… However, you and a few others are a special case in that you have no family to go to outside of the city, and would have no one to live with should you do so. The Ministry has therefore ruled that should students such as yourself wish it, you may return to Hogwarts a month early in order to be kept safe."

Tom felt off-kilter. Firstly, he was being offered the thing which he had nearly begged from Dumbledore the first time that he had had to go home for the summer– and the man who had denied it was now offering it to him. He was also shocked there were students who were like himself– orphans, unattached, who would be at the castle as well. Tom unintentionally bit his lip. He wanted so very badly to be at Hogwarts, but he felt as though there were some catch or some fine print attached to this offer.

"What's the catch?" he asked emotionlessly, staring Dumbledore in the eyes.

Dumbledore smiled slightly.

"You're very defensive, Tom… However, yes. There is, as you say it, a 'catch'. Not a brutal one– it is simply that you cannot do magic until the school year begins, no different than any other student this summer."

Tom thought for a moment. That wasn't terribly bad. It also wasn't as though the other students were allowed to do magic while he was denied. He would be at Hogwarts, at the very least, and he would be able to fully use the library and the other things the castle had to offer. Just because he couldn't _perform_ magic didn't mean he couldn't continue to study it. At the orphanage, he couldn't even do that.

"Yes," he said, after a few moments, "I would like to go to Hogwarts."

Dumbledore raised his eyebrow.

"Please," Tom tacked on hastily. He despised having to suck up to Dumbledore, of all people, but he couldn't quite contain his desire to be at the place he loved the most. If that meant pretending to be polite to the quirky professor, he would do it.

Dumbledore smiled pleasantly at him, and waved his long, elegant wand. Tom felt the ringing in his ears lessen and then subside, and watched as the soot, grime and blood on his body and clothes ebb away and then vanish.

"Good, then. Let us retrieve your things!"


End file.
